Modern data processing systems are often implemented as distributed computing environments, such as "client/server" configurations in which a number of "client" computers, typically personal computers or workstations, communicate with one or more "server" computers and request server computers to perform processing tasks.
To promote network efficiency, objects, such as database tables, are often distributed among client and server computers. In particular, database tables are often stored on a server computer (such as a mainframe computer), where client computers can access the database tables on the server computer.
Applications running on client computers may call for data in such database tables on the server computer, and consequently the server computer must transfer data to the client computers. Known systems will automatically and periodically transfer large amounts of data from the database tables to the client computers. However, periodically transferring large amounts of data to client computers can be very time consuming and wastes valuable system resources since not all client computers will need all the data being transferred. Moreover, the transferred data can become out of date because there may be frequent updates between transfers.
Therefore, it is desirable to have a more reliable and efficient method for transferring data stored on a server computer to a client computer than is currently known.